


The Eighth

by DetectiveRoboRyan



Series: Wings of Rebellion [1]
Category: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Fire Emblem Series
Genre: Also Vikings, Child Abuse, Gen, Inappropriate Irreverence, Jokes but like Sad and Uncomfortable Jokes, Kids With Axes, Lima Beans AU, Neglect, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-02 01:40:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16777072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveRoboRyan/pseuds/DetectiveRoboRyan
Summary: King Lima Rothschild IV's first child is the daughter of an Archanean warrior of the frozen north, the runt and only survivor of the childbirth that ended in tragedy, the bastard child of a selfish and uncaring king that he only named out of necessity, when she proved absolutely everybody wrong and survived past toddlerhood. Octavia Rothschild, all frizzy red hair and explosive tantrums and spite; eldest princess of Zofia and the result of what's best described as a series of mistakes, who spends her early life separate from her younger siblings for their own safety, who, when the nursemaids whisper of the monster child, gives them exactly that.Talia is sixteen to Octavia's twelve when they meet, and she thinks this is bullshit.





	The Eighth

**Author's Note:**

> yeah archanea has vikings now dw about it

The courtship of King Lima Rothschild IV and Maghenyld the Red of the Branka tribe of the Sunless Lands of northern Archanea is best summarized as a series of mistakes.  
  
It goes like this. It is 366 VC. Maghenyld shows up on a warship looking for a place to conquer. Lima sees an opportunity and tells her that she would be right at home leading his army to conquer their Rigelian neighbors (and conveniently does not tell her that the reason he's okay with this is because he promised to send aid but didn't want to), so he'll let her be in charge and have all of Zofia's (negligible, admittedly) military might, but she has to marry him first.  
  
Mag's first mistake is that she entertained this deal in the first place. Really, she should've told Lima to stick it, gotten back on her ship, and tried again to conquer Aurelis. It would have been preferrable, at least for her, to die honorably in battle against elk cavalry and trebuchets.  
  
"I want a castle and somewhere to conquer," is essentially what Mag tells the king.  
  
"Cool beans," Lima replies. "Let me fuck you and I can get you that."  
  
"You are a vile, pathetic, cockroach of a man," Mag tells him. "I absolutely loathe you and this entire country of debauched degenerates, as well as everything you stand for. You would not last ten seconds on my ship because we would tear you apart and feed you to the goats."  
  
"So you'll do it?" Lima asks.  
  
"You get five minutes."  
  
Mag's second mistake is that she agreed. It is the most boring five minutes of her life. It is somewhat comparable to leaning on a bar and knocking back shots of straight vodka while two people loudly procreate somewhere behind you, likely because Mag knocks back shots of straight vodka while Lima makes enough disgusting male noises for two people. Mag compares the experience, in terms of how much it affected her, to getting a haircut.  
  
Lima rolls over and falls asleep when it's done. Maghenyld considers very seriously just wringing his neck then and there, and her third mistake is that she doesn't. Really, the whole series of events relating to Lima's children is a series of mistakes that could have been avoided if Mag had ended the Rothschild line then and there, and while she was at it, just went ahead and conquere the whole continent. It would've saved everyone a lot of trouble.  
  
So Mag's fourth mistake is that, upon finding out she was pregnant, she did not get back on her ship and go home. It is, in fact, a mystery why she didn't. Perhaps she was preoccupied planning her grand conquest of Rigel and scoffing at the idea of a "divine accord," whatever that is. Perhaps she planned on having the baby and leaving it with Lima and then going home. Perhaps she was just the kind of person who would have a child if it meant getting the means to conquer, because she just loved conquering that much.  
  
"Queen Maghenyld," one of the war generals, a bulky, square-shaped paladin called Chance, tries to tell the heavily-pregnant berserker queen that Lima has given control of the military to. "If we cross the Rigelian border, the Divine Dragon Duma will surely rain vengeance upon us all!"  
  
"Good!" Mag says heartily. "I've never fought a Divine Dragon before! That should really get my blood pumping!"  
  
Her crew of warriors cheers. Everything Mag does is the best idea anyone has ever come up with to them. Perhaps this is another reason that Mag didn't just leave before any of what happened ever happened— nobody thought it was a bad idea.  
  
(The mistake Ser Chance made was not resigning, but really, nobody can blame him. Maghenyld the Red did not take kindly to deserters.)  
  
It is a well-known fact of life that human pregnancy is kind of a crapshoot. Our stupid giant brains mean heavy babies with giant heads, and our squishy organs need room to function, and carrying around the weight of a watermelon for longer than ten or so months would kill us. So when Maghenyld expected one baby and, seven and a half months later, there were eight, it was a tragedy but not a surprise when Mag and seven of the babies did not survive.  
  
It was as if the people had said, "We can't have an invincible warrior queen with eight barbarian children! Mila, please nerf!" And Mila had replied "Okay," and killed all but one of them.  
  
Flippancy aside, this is how Rigel got off un-conquered, Maghenyld the Red's crew burned her body at sea and then went home (because even the challenge of conquering Rigel wasn't worth it without their fearless captain), and Lima Rothschild IV ended up with the runt— a flushed, angry little thing that entered the world covered in someone else's blood and screaming and wasn't afraid to leave it the same way.  
  
"Oh, she'll die too, before her third year," Lima says, probably eating grapes and smoking weed and watching strippers on his throne. "No need to name her."  
  
And so, nobody does.  
  
The child's first birthday comes and goes, and so, too, does her second, full of tantrums and shrieking and an ever-rotating cast of nursemaids going to the infirmary with bite marks that only get worse as she cuts her teeth. She grows strong, strong from her mother's Archanean blood, and her nursemaids will occasionally wonder, when the child's exhausted herself for the night, if she's growing so strong to spite her father.  
  
Well, if so, they can't blame her. The man is such a bastard, even his daughter hates him.  
  
In the meantime, Lima IV courts a woman called Claudia, a young noblewoman turned Cleric of Mila. Lady Claudia keeps to herself and speaks in short, polite sentences, so nobody bothers to ask her why she's with Lima, but what seems most likely is that she has simply stopped caring. So with Mag gone and her child a menace kept sequestered in the villa nursery where she can scream and hit and throw her toys without risking embarrassing her father, Lady Claudia turns it into something more to her liking— tapestries and icons of the Earth-Mother on the walls, lit by elegant candelabra, and no trace of Maghenyld the Red left anywhere she can reach— except for one embarrassing remnant that she meets exactly once while she's pregnant with Lima's second child and decides never to see again. But Lady Claudia doesn't have the authority to order they leave the child in the woods to be eaten by wolves (even if the wolves would raise her more than the rotating cast of nursemaids would), and Lima doesn't care, so Mag's girl stays and the nursemaids turn their attention to the new baby, born halfway into the princess's second year.  
  
Baby Arcturus (which is far too large a name for how small he is) is born in 369 VC, a healthy baby boy with a quiet, even temperment so far removed from his elder sister's that the nursemaids wonder if they even have the same father at all. Not long after his birth, his mother disappears, leaving two motherless children in a villa full of nurses with a father that doesn't even care they exist.  
  
On the princess's third birthday (they've been calling her 'princess' until this point, which is not an actual name), Lima sighs and admits that she survived longer than he thought she would, so he _supposes_ she needs an name. He thinks for a minute (the longest amount of continuous time he's spent giving thought to any of his children) and says, "Call her Octavia."  
  
"Oh, yes, for being the eighth of her siblings," the governess says. "Of course, my king. It shall be done."  
  
So Maghenyld's little girl gets a name on her third birthday, the first and only gift from her father that she'd ever recieve, and she can't even pronounce it.  
  
"That's your name," the governess tells her. "Octavia."  
  
"'Kay-vee-a," she says. "Why?"  
  
"Your father said so," the governess says.  
  
Little Octavia narrows her eyes. "Don' like fobber," she says.  
  
Another nurse snorts. "You and the rest of Zofia, princess."  
  
Octavia sees little Arcturus when he's still an infant in swaddling clothes, but only from a distance. The day after they bring him into the nursery, they move Octavia into another room— _a room for big girls_ , a hapless nursemaid tells her in some attempt to get her to go along with it. The room has three doors, one leading to the hallway, one leading to the bathing chamber, and one leading to the big nursery. It's smaller and has yellow paint on the walls and only one bed, a twin bed with a green blanket that smells like closets. She can't reach the top drawers in the chest, but the drawers she can are full of her socks and smallclothes. The bookshelf has the same old storybooks that Octavia can't read but with pictures she likes looking at in rare moments where nobody bothers her. It has a big window that doesn't open because it's too high up to be safe, just like the nursery, but this one doesn't have curtains, probably because Octavia yanked down and tore the nursery curtains because nobody listens to her if she doesn't yell and cry and break things. She doesn't like it— she thinks it smells like forgotten things and the air feels stuffy, like it's filling her little lungs with cobwebs. The only thing Octavia likes about the room is that there are no dolls anywhere and the closet has a space in the back where she can hide if she curls up very small and that someone has thought to put Maghenyld's cape in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. Octavia likes her mother's cape, even before they tell her it was her mother's. She's far too small for it, of course, but she likes to wrap herself in it, and the bear fur is warmer than the blankets.  
  
This is her big girl room, they tell her. It's all hers and her baby brother can't come in because it has a lock on the door. But as the nights go by all it means for Octavia is that her governess can shut her in there when she misbehaves and no matter how many times she bangs on the door and the walls, there will be no one coming in to try and make her calm down. No matter how many times she calls, no one will come.  
  
So time goes by, and when little Octavia is five, a well-meaning nurse decides that she ought to meet her little brother. Arcturus is two and a half, quiet and intelligent and somber like his mother but looking, as one would expect of a son, like his father, and different from his sister in that the most difficult-to-raise part of him is his unquenchable curiosity. By the time he's toddling, little Arc, as they call him, has tried to break into every cabinet, pull on every tablecloth and drapery, and put everything anyone drops into his mouth. Arcturus Erasmus Rothschild is the reason the concept of baby-proofing exists.  
  
Octavia meets him under the auspices of her governess, a woman called Emmalina that's known for being perhaps more stern than fair, but she has a will that rivals Octavia's own, and is thus far the only nursemaid that remains unafraid of the "monster child." There are more nursemaids there that have names, surely, but there are so many of them and they come and go so quickly that Octavia's stopped bothering to learn them. Arc's nursery is cluttered but orderly, with toys inside the toybox and blocks in the general area of where they're supposed to go. Lady Sibyl, their father's newest wife, sits in a rocking chair with a hand on her bulging pregnancy— she swears it's twin girls, but nobody knows how she knows that.  
  
"This is your older sister, Octavia," Governess Emmalina says to little Arc. "Can you say hello, little one?"  
  
"Hewwo," Arc says shyly around the two forefingers in his mouth.  
  
Octavia frowns. "You talk dumb," she tells him.  
  
"Princess Octavia!" Emmalina hisses. "He's half your age!"  
  
"So?" Octavia demands. "This is boring. I'm going back to my room." She yanks her shoulders free from Emmalina's iron-nailed grip. Emmalina only grabs tighter, her nails digging in until Octavia hisses in pain.  
  
"This is _not_ optional, princess," Emmalina says firmly. "You _will_ stay here and meet your younger brother. Now behave!"  
  
Octavia growls. Little Arc has taken a few careful, toddling steps closer, gripping a favorite stuffed toy— a lion with wool yarn for a mane and black button eyes. Octavia yanks her shoulder from Adeline's grip, looking her in the eyes as she stands in front of her brother with her arms folded. The truth is that Octavia has never met another child before this point, so she has no idea what to do. And judging from the fact that her brother is two, neither does he.  
  
But Octavia knows enough by now to know that if she misbehaves, she gets hit, and she doesn't really want that, so she'll be nice to her stupid baby brother. She idly wanders around the nursery, looking with mild interest at the decorations. Her room doesn't have decorations because she broke all the picture frames. He has a shelf of storybooks— she's got the same ones. Octavia likes stories. Her favorites are the exciting ones, about knights or pirates or adventurers. She's been told that her mother was a warrior from the north. She doesn't have any storybooks about those kinds of warriors, but she likes to imagine it— in her imagination, they ride on fire-breathing dragons and fight any monster they come across, like the Thing That Lives In The Closet At Night or the Giant Snake Octavia Saw In A Bad Dream That One Time or Governess Emmalina's Cane. Maybe that's not the case, but Octavia is five, so she doesn't care.  
  
She runs her thumb across the spines of the thin storybooks. Some of them have bite marks on the spines— they're probably his favorites, because Arc is a baby and babies chew on books. But she doesn't touch any of them because they're not her books. They're not her books, this is not her room, and this may as well not even be where she lives. Where she lives is the yellow paint and musty blankets and stuffy air behind that locked door where Emmalina stands, guarding the nursery like a gargoyle on an old building, and she doesn't even deserve to _be_ in this picturesque room with cradles and patched-up toys and music boxes and a mother in the rocking chair.  
  
Octavia hates this place, hates its pretty curtains and toys that get fixed when they break or tear. She hates its cradles and low beds with embroidered blankets and the star shapes cut from painted wood hanging from the ceiling. She hates the open doorway that means Arc can toddle in and out as he pleases. And most of all, she hates Arc, her stupid baby brother who waddles around drooling all over his hand and getting picked up when he asks for it and soothed and cooed over when he cries.  
  
She glares at the books and yanks her hand away. Arc is standing behind her with his two forefingers in his mouth and his lion tucked into his chubby arm.  
  
Octavia glares at him, too. "Stop following me," she says.  
  
Arc giggles, like it's funny. Octavia doesn't like this one bit.  
  
"I _said_ stop!" she says, louder, and Arc only giggles harder. He toddles forward and fists his hands in her shirt.  
  
Octavia _hates_ this. Octavia hates that he's giggling and not listening to her and _touching_ _her_ , and Octavia hates being touched perhaps most of all, and he's doing all of this, all at once, and all Octavia can hear is blood rushing in her ears. She sees red. She grabs his arms and shoves them back and she smacks him on the back of his shoulder, just like Emmalina does when she misbehaves. And then Arc is crying and there are more hands grabbing her by her arms and Emmalina's gripping the back of her neck, and she doesn't like this either and she's angry, angry, but all the rage in her tiny five-year-old body can't ever hope to make Emmalina bow.  
  
When the rushing fades and there's bruises aching red and purple on her back and she breathes through the stuffing in her chest, Octavia curls up inside her mother's pelt cloak in her hiding spot in the closet and thinks about the northern warriors who all wear lion cloaks and ride dragons, and makes up a story in her head of her mother leading her army into the villa and fighting off Emmalina with a sword bigger than she is, all to rescue her lost daughter and take her back to the distant north, where she's supposed to be— away from locked doors and curtainless windows and broken toys and stupid baby brothers and shelves full of books with no one to read them.  
  
Lady Sibyl has twins, but they're a boy and a girl. She deals with it in a way that's very Lady Sibyl and laughs it off, saying _prophecy is really more of an art than a science_. Lady Sibyl is cheerful where Claudia was somber, the comedy to her tragedy without ever having met her. Lady Aeschine is next, and she's not somber, necessarily, but serious— she has the same kind of firm authority as Emmalina, and Octavia has met her exactly once but dislikes her because of it.  
  
When Octavia is eight, Lady Aeschine's son Endymion is born as the fifth and youngest of the Rothschild siblings. Octavia is not allowed to see him or the twins or Arcturus, but Octavia's been led to believe that they don't want to see her. To the royal villa, Octavia is the monster child, the one born from a barbarian, the one survivor of an octuplet pregnancy gone horribly awry, the one who screams and throws tantrums that just get more dangerous as she grows older, the one who, at eight, has broken noses and fingers of numerous unlucky nurses who were in just the right spot to meet her elbow or head or fist when they grabbed her— the one grown adults are terrified of dealing with.  
  
They try to make her into a princess anyway— if not a princess fit to rule, then at the very least a princess who can control herself enough to not embarrass her entire family in front of the rest of Zofia. There are lessons in reading, writing, numbers, facts; history and speaking and etiquette and clerical mathematics, and how to properly tend to her appearance, which Octavia only puts up with because Emmalina lets her do it herself. She wears dresses and combs her wild mane of red hair, scrubs the puffiness from her eyes and forces down the scowl in her face, and in the mirror, if she doesn't look too closely, she almost looks like a Rothschild.  
  
Naturally, Octavia does it wrong every time, and the nursemaids have to fix it, and Octavia hates every pinching, poking, squeezing, _awful_ second and how much worse it makes the stuffiness in her breath. She's too old for screaming tantrums because she's eight, now, not a little girl anymore, but she still makes it _very_ clear what she thinks of all this business, and Emmalina still hasn't taught her any way to express that she doesn't like something that doesn't involve hitting. And while they fight this battle, Lima takes more wives and has more children that Octavia isn't allowed to meet.  
  
Lucille engages even less than Claudia did and leaves without a word three days after her daughter's birth when Octavia is ten, her daughter the only proof she was even there at all. With no mother to name her the nursemaids turn again to Lima, and Lima sighs and calls her Sice, another number name, because she's the sixth of her siblings, and then asks if he can perhaps _please_ not be bothered with this nonsense anymore. Alida, a pegasus knight from Talys, joins the mothers when Octavia is eleven and soon after comes Viktoriya, a Rigelian cleric of the Duma Faithful, in a manner of speaking, and while Liprica is not a mother, she is one of Lima's wives— while Octavia doesn't care about rumors because she's eleven and has bigger things to worry about, whispers say that she and Viktoriya are secretly lovers.  
  
But what they are couldn't matter less to Octavia. They're still out there, on the other side of the nursery door, and Octavia is sequestered away with a desk full of homework and a closet full of dresses and lungs full of cobwebs and the ever-present knowledge that she's too old to curl up in her mother's old cloak, its ends shabby from how often she's gripped it, and think about the Archanean Frost Warriors and their fierce warships that could cleave glaciers and make krakens falter. She's too old to think about the Frost Warriors and their warships and their fur cloaks and big warhammers, and too old to ignore the fact that she knows her mother is dead by thinking about a wild-haired berserker queen breaking down the locked door to take Octavia back to a land of ice and darkness and hunting gigantic animals with spears and axes.  
  
Octavia Rothschild is twelve years old, and she misses a mother she never knew, and longs for a homeland she's only ever read about in books.  
  


* * *

  
Talia is sixteen years old. She's from a little village in the countryside, where she grew up with a mother and father, like lots of village girls. They're in good health and she wanted to see the world, so she said her goodbyes and found herself in the capital. A nursemaid is not what she set out to be, but Emmaline offered an excellent salary to whoever proved able to handle the eldest princess, and Talia thinks it'd be nice to send some money home.  
  
She tells Octavia this on her first day, on her first assignment, which is to wrangle Octavia's hair out of the mess that happened when Octavia tried to do it herself. Octavia glowers at her reflection in the mirror (her father's eyes, her mother's nose and jaw) and thinks about Talia's thin fingers, her skinny wrists on lanky teenage arms, and how easy it would be to break them.  
  
But she doesn't. Talia hasn't done anything she doesn't like, so she doesn't need to hit her. That's how Emmalina did it, and Octavia doesn't know any other way.  
  
"You know, you don't seem _so_ bad," Talia says brightly, untangling Octavia's curls and taming them into something a little more manageable. "I'd heard the rumors, you know? About those poor nurses."  
  
"It's true," Octavia says bluntly. "They're all scared of me."  
  
Talia falters. "Oh."  
  
"They kept doing things I didn't want," Octavia says. "All of them do. So I hit them. It's not _my_ fault they broke."  
  
"Well, you know, my mother and father taught me that it wasn't nice to hit people," Talia says.  
  
"My mother is dead and my father is a bastard," Octavia replies. "They didn't do a very good job of teaching me."  
  
Talia has the overwhelming feeling that this is going to be a very difficult paycheck.  
  
As far as Octavia is concerned, things don't really change much. Talia comes in every morning to de-tangle her hair and make it presentable, and every day she makes it into two braids, not so tight they pull on Octavia's scalp but always firmly tied at the ends with two green ribbons. Her hair is a bright copper color, and it's thick, coarse, and its curls are tight; really, it's more frizzy than curly. Talia's is the exact opposite, soft and fine and dark brown, falling in messy waves down to her jaw, but she does her best with Octavia's hair anyway.  
  
Talia talks while she works, her hands in Octavia's hair, and Octavia doesn't like being touched but Talia doesn't try to any more than she needs. When she's done she always bows politely and takes her leave to allow Octavia to dress herself, and Octavia always has to lean on the bathroom counter and look at the braids, at the green ribbons, and at how it looks with her thick chin and squarish jaw and her cheeks soft with baby fat. They're always a little lopsided in a different way each day, and they're something one would find on any other twelve-year-old girl— on any twelve-year-old girl that doesn't break nursemaid's bones and daydream about barbarians from the north. It feels silly knowing that most girls her age dream about secretly being princesses, and Octavia, the eldest of Zofia's princesses, dreams about warships and battleaxes.  
  
Octavia still breaks bones. She sends a woman to the infirmary clutching her broken nose and Emmalina punishes her for it, she always does, and Octavia curls up on her bed under her mother's pelt, feeling the ache and stubbornly refusing to cry because she's not a little girl anymore and if she cries she'll upset the little ones in the next room— two-year-old Sice and Lady Alida's little newborn, and in the coming months Lady Viktoriya's baby will join them.  
  
She doesn't want Talia there. When the door opens she fumbles for something to throw and comes up empty, so she sneers and buries herself further in Maghenyld's bear fur.  
  
"Princess Octavia," she says quietly, and Octavia hates her for it, because she's not meant for gentle words and tender things, for pretty decorations and stars dangling from the rafters, for storytimes and lullabies and and rocking chairs and mothers that kiss foreheads to scare away the nightmares. Octavia is not soft. Octavia is not gentle. Emmalina has decided she's a monster and everyone else says so, too, so a monster is what they'll get.  
  
"Go away," Octavia says, trying to sound like the princess everyone tells her she is.  
  
"I will," Talia says. "But I want to talk to you first."  
  
Octavia doesn't say anything. Neither does Talia.  
  
"Talk, then," Octavia finally says. She shifts further under the pelt.  
  
Talia chews on what to say for a while. "I don't think you're a monster child, like the n— the rumors say," she says.  
  
"You're wrong," Octavia tells her, because obviously Talia is wrong and obviously that is bullshit. "I know everyone thinks so. That's why I'm here. That's why the door locks from the outside. That's why I can't talk to any of the others. I'll hurt them."  
  
"They've told you that, but I don't believe it," Talia insists. (Octavia sneers.) "Princess Octavia, do you know why you hit that nurse?"

Octavia rubs her eyes. "She said it was time for lunch," she says. "But I didn't want to go. I was busy reading and I always lose my place if I have to stop before I'm done. She grabbed my arm so I hit her."  
  
"You didn't like being grabbed like that?"  
  
Octavia shakes her head.  
  
Talia hums. "I can imagine," she says. "I don't think anyone would."  
  
"I tried to tell them that," Octavia says. "I've tried to tell them I don't like being touched. But nobody listened. Nobody ever listens."  
  
"Princess Octavia," Talia says. "Can you sit up and talk to me? I can't hear you very well from there."  
  
Hesitantly, her mother's cloak still wrapped around her shoulders, Octavia sits up. Talia's pulled her desk chair over next to the bed and sat down, her knees pressed together under her white skirts. The nurses always wear white, and Octavia isn't sure why.  
  
"Did you want to hurt that nurse?" Talia asks.  
  
Octavia nods.  
  
"Why?"  
  
Octavia hesitates. "I was angry," she says. "When I get angry, people get hurt. I want them to hurt."  
  
"Do you hurt?" Talia asks.  
  
"Sometimes." Octavia shifts uncomfortably. "I want to hurt Madame Emmalina. She hurts me and I want her to hurt back, but I'm not strong enough."  
  
Talia hums. "Princess Octavia," she says. "Are you angry?"  
  
Octavia nods. She's well-acquainted with anger— it burns bright inside of her, threatening to consume everything, starting with herself, but if she goes up in flames then it doesn't matter if she can take whatever hurts her with it. She wants the world to burn. She wants the world to hurt like the bruising on her back.  
  
(But Octavia is still only twelve, and there's a whisper inside of her that's afraid of being consumed by the flames.)  
  
Talia says she knows how to fix this. Octavia doubts that, but she hears Talia arguing, constantly, with Emmalina outside her bedroom door. Emmalina doesn't hit Talia but Octavia flinches every time she thinks it might be coming, and she wants to bang on the door and tell Talia, the only person she's met that hasn't run away, the only person she's met that _listens_ to her, to not try to fight Emmalina because Emmalina is unbeatable, unshakeable.  
  
But Emmalina does something that Octavia has never even thought of, after enough pressing from Talia— she gives in.  
  
Octavia thinks that Talia must be the strongest person she has ever met.  
  
In two weeks' time, Talia, her eyes shining with excitement, leads Octavia to a place in a bigger couryard that Octavia has never seen before. It's a square lot of hard-packed dirt surrounded by a split-rail fence full of dummies— wooden things shaped into the approximation of a human torso and head, with sandbags weighing down the bases. Octavia doesn't understand.  
  
Talia hands her an axe made of cast bronze. It's heavy in her hands, but it's the same shape as the tomahawks drawn in the books about the Archanean Northerners. In the books she's read, books with very few pictures made for older children, books about heroes and adventures and worlds that don't have to match the one she knows, the hero's weapon will sing when their hand comes to rest upon it, and fit in their hand perfectly. This does not happen with Octavia and this axe— her palms are baby-soft and the roughness of the wooden handle doesn't suit them, and it's just a bit too big and off-balance because it's made for adults, which Octavia isn't.  
  
Octavia frowns, and looks at Talia. "What am I supposed to do with this thing?"  
  
Talia walks around to the other side of the fence. "You hit things with it," she says. "You know, because it's a weapon?"  
  
"You're _giving_ me a weapon?" Octavia repeats. "But I—"  
  
"Just trust me," Talia insists. "You're angry, right? Use it. The dummies can take it— that's what they're for."  
  
Octavia looks at the axe in her hands, and then to the row of dummies. Anger, Talia said— she can do that. She raises the axe and swings it with all her strength, and the dull blade sticks with a solid thunk in the rough wood.  
  
Her heart beats loud, loud in her ears. She does it again. She thinks of the lock on her bedroom door, the stupid yellow paint, the closet full of dresses. She thinks of the babies in the nursery she's never been allowed to meet with curtains and music boxes and rocking chairs. She thinks of her tutors smacking her across the knuckles with a ruler when she loses focus during lessons, of ugly faces in the bathroom mirror when they try to fit her into what a princess ought to be, of the sting of Emmalina's cane and the aching bruises on her back, of monsters in the dark corners of her rooms, of a mother and a homeland that left her behind in a place she doesn't belong, of locked doors and muffled voices and hurting in her tiny fists and shouting, yelling, crying until her voice gives out. She thinks of being small and upset and angry and crying at the silence until she learns that nobody will come, no matter how loud she screams and no matter how hard she bangs on the door, because she's afraid of monsters lurking in the dark corners but later, later, when she's old enough to understand what they all say, she learns better, and there are no monsters in the closet at night.  
  
There are no monsters.  
  
Octavia is and Octavia has always been the monster in the closet.  
  
The axe falls from her hands, blistered and aching. Her chest trembles. Her shaking knees give out below her, dropping her to the ground— the ground covered in wood chips and sand leaking from the sacks.  
  
Her throat hurts. There are tears in her eyes. She's not sure if she's crying or laughing.  
  
She takes in a breath. Her heart beats like war drums in her ears. Her muscles ache from exertion and sweat coats her skin and the axe in her hand is not hers and yet it feels right— she feels strong, she feels fearless, she feels _invincible_.  
  
Talia sits down in front of her, getting dirt and wood chips all over her starched white uniform. "Do you feel better?" she asks.  
  
Octavia nods.  
  
"How do you feel?" Talia asks.  
  
Octavia considers this. "Good," she says. "I'm— happy, I guess?" There's definitely more to it, but it's not like anyone taught her _how_ to label complex emotions.  
  
"Do you feel angry?" Talia asks.  
  
She doesn't. Octavia shakes her head and Talia doesn't grin with her mouth but with the rest of her face, and she sparkles like the sunshine off the metal pane frames in Octavia's window. It's lively and bright and genuine, and Octavia thinks, then, that Talia is the best person she knows, full stop. (A part of her wonders what in the world someone like Talia, so good and so strong, stronger than Octavia thinks she could ever be, is doing talking to her.)  
  
"Alright, so, Princess Octavia," Talia says, clasping her hands together, you know, like how people do when they're about to make a plan of how shit's gonna get done. "I have a few things I want to ask you."  
  
"You always ask things," Octavia points out.  
  
"Then this shouldn't be a surprise," Talia replies. "First! Do you think that, the next time you get angry or want to hurt somebody, you can come out here and take it out on the dummies?"  
  
Octavia looks at the piles of wood chips and sand. "There need to be new dummies first."  
  
"Well, that can be arranged." Because frankly if Talia convinced Emmalina to let her put a weapon in the hands of a twelve-year-old with behavioral problems, she can do anything. "Second! I know most of your little siblings have nicknames. Do you?"  
  
Slowly, Octavia shakes her head.  
  
Talia clicks her tongue. "Well, that won't do. Octavia's kind of a mouthful, especially for the littler ones. How about I call you Tavi? Do you like that?"  
  
_Tavi_. Octavia's never thought much about her own name before this, except for knowing her father only named her after she'd lived longer than anyone had expected, for the result of a series of mistakes her mother made. But it seems fitting that Talia would pull something good out of a wreck like Octavia, starting with her name and working up to the rest of her.  
  
Octavia nods. "Tavi," she says. "I like that."  
  
Talia gets to her feet, brushing the wood chips off her apron. "Last thing," she says. But she doesn't say anything, only holds out her hand— it's open, her palm angled slightly upwards, and Tavi looks warily from her hand to her face and back until Talia nods encouragement. Not sure what to expect, Tavi takes it.  
  
She hadn't realized how soft someone else's touch could feel.  
  
Talia pulls her to her feet, but she doesn't let go of Tavi's hand. Tavi looks at her— really _looks_ at her, which she hadn't bothered to do until now. Talia's hair is dark brown and it falls in soft curls, she knew, but she didn't know that her eyes were green like that, like bright summertime grass, and she didn't know that Talia's front teeth have a gap between them and they stick out just a little at different angles, and she didn't know that Talia looks younger than all the rest of the nursemaids even though, cognitively, she knew Talia was only sixteen to Tavi's twelve.  
  
"You know, Tavi— or, Princess Tavi, I suppose, but that sounds a little strange, right?" Talia chuckles. She's always asking. Tavi finds that she likes being asked.  
  
"Tavi is fine," Tavi admits.  
  
"Oh, good." Talia beams, and suddenly there are no monsters in Tavi's room because Talia shooed them all away. "I think we're going to be good friends, Tavi. Are you hungry? It's about lunchtime, right? And you did just burn a lot of energy." She pulls her hand from Tavi's, and Tavi's hand curls around emptiness. It hurts more now that she knows what it feels like when that space is filled.  
  
Talia's taken a few steps back towards the manor. Tavi takes a halting step forward and she blurts out "Wait—"  
  
Talia stops. "What's the matter?" she asks. Maybe it's the fact that Tavi's burned off all her anger turning dummies into mulch, but she hears concern in Talia's voice; concern, care, attentiveness, and Tavi feels an ache in her gut. It feels strange and wrong and part of her has always told her that she's not meant for gentleness, that people hurt themselves on her sharp edges and hot temper, but now, now, with the anger exhausted, Tavi finds she craves it.  
  
Tavi opens her mouth and shuts it again. "I want—" she stops. "Can I…"  
  
Words escape her. She holds out her hand. Talia looks from her hand to her face, and she smiles, not quite the brilliant grin she gave Tavi just a minute before, but something gentle, something tender.  
  
Talia takes her hand. For the first time, Tavi does not feel alone.

**Author's Note:**

> so i wanted to do another scene with tavi and arc when they're older and how tavi gets to meet the rest of her little siblings, but like. cmon. that's a perfect ending. so look forward to a coda at some point i guess


End file.
